The Golden Son of Srinjaya

Night had come down over the Kuru camp thick and wrong, the kind of dark that seemed to have poured in through the tent flaps rather than simply fallen, and inside the command tent Yudhishthira sat as he had sat for hours, not moving, a king who had stopped being able to hold the shape of a king. Abhimanyu was dead. Sixteen years old, Arjuna's son, Subhadra's son, walked into the coiled trap of the chakravyuha because his father was elsewhere and his uncle's word had sent him in anyway, promising support that never came, and the boy had died alone inside a ring of the greatest warriors alive, cut down after his weapons broke, after his chariot broke, after everything broke except the boy himself, who apparently could not be made to stop fighting until six men together made certain of it.

'I sent him,' Yudhishthira said, not for the first time that night, to no one in particular, to the lamp, to his own hands. 'I needed the formation broken and I sent a boy who had learned half the way in and none of the way out, and I told myself Satyaki and Bhima would follow him through, and they did not reach him, and he is dead, and I am the one who decided he should go in.'

It was his brothers who first heard the tent flap move, and looked up, and rose without surprise, because some arrivals a person simply recognizes before they are announced. Vyasa entered as he always entered, without ceremony, an old man with the weight of every story ever told sitting easily on him, and he looked once at the wrecked king before he sat, and did not begin with soft words, because he had never been a teacher who mistook softness for help.

'I will not tell you grief is unearned,' Vyasa said. 'It is not. But grief is not what the wise owe the dead.' And he told the king first how Death herself had been born from the Creator's anger, how she had wept at the work she was given and been set to it anyway, and how she takes the living without malice, because it is only the living who die. Yudhishthira heard it through, and when it was done he asked for more: the deeds of the great royal sages of old, sinless and truthful, and what became of them. 'Then listen,' Vyasa said, 'if you can bear one more thing tonight.'

'There was once a king named Srinjaya,' Vyasa began, 'who ruled well and ruled long and lacked only one thing that every king in every age seems to lack until the story is ready to give it to him or take it from him for good: he had no son. He had a daughter he loved and no heir, and the kingdom's future sat in his chest like a stone he carried everywhere and could put down nowhere.

'It happened that the sage Narada and the sage Parvata came traveling through Srinjaya's country, and the king, who understood hospitality as a duty owed even to those who asked nothing, served them with such devotion - his own hands at the washing, his own voice at the welcome, no servant allowed to stand between his gratitude and its object - that the sages were moved past the ordinary courtesy a king's welcome earns. Ask, they told him, for whatever you lack, and it will be granted, because a heart like yours should not go on carrying a stone it did not choose.

'Srinjaya asked for a son, and asked for everything a king could want in one: accomplished, famous, of great energy, able to chastise every foe. And then, because a king's mind is never far from his treasury, he asked for one thing more: that the boy's urine and excreta, his phlegm and his sweat, should all be gold. Narada granted it, the way boons in the old stories are granted, carrying inside their generosity a seed of the very grief they seem to be curing. The boy who was born to Srinjaya's queen was named Suvarnashthivin, which means the one who spits gold, for whatever his infant body shed - his sweat, his spittle, even his excreta - turned to gold, as though the boy were not a child at all but a treasury that had somehow learned to laugh and crawl and demand milk.

'You may imagine the rejoicing. A kingdom that had feared for its succession now had an heir who could, it seemed, fund a hundred years of that succession simply by existing. Srinjaya's treasury swelled without a single tax raised. Guards who had once watched borders were set instead to watch a nursery, because the greatest wealth in the kingdom now slept in a cradle and cried when it was hungry like any other child, gold or no gold notwithstanding.'

'A treasure that walks is a treasure that can be walked away with, and there is no guard thorough enough, in the end, to watch a temptation for every hour of every year forever. The story does not linger on how it happened - only that it did. A band of robbers, having heard what every trader and pilgrim in three kingdoms had by then heard, that Srinjaya's son shed gold the way other children shed milk-teeth, came for the boy as men come for any treasure they have decided is worth a killing.

'They took him from the palace grounds in the dark and carried him deep into the forest, away from any road a search party might think to walk, and there, meaning to harvest what they had stolen at their leisure and far from any rescue, they killed him and cut his body to pieces, senseless with greed and not knowing what else to do with what they had stolen.

'And then they found nothing. No gold lay in the boy's small body once the life had left it. No gold clung to the leaves where he had fallen, none in the dirt beneath him, none anywhere a robber's frantic hands could search by torchlight in a forest at night. Whatever had made the child gold had been the child's life itself, inseparable from it, spent the instant the life was spent, and the robbers stood over an ordinary dead boy in the dark, having killed for a fortune that had died in the same moment as its bearer. All the gold the boon had given was gone. Then the robbers, maddened, fell on one another, and struck one another down until none of them was left, and went to a hell no one can imagine.

'When the news reached Srinjaya - not gently, there is no gentle way such news arrives - the king did not weep as a man weeps who has lost wealth. He wept as a man weeps who has lost his son, which was, of course, the whole of what he had actually lost, though it took the robbers' failure to find any gold to make the kingdom understand that the boy had never truly been a treasury to begin with, only a child who happened to shed one.'

'When Srinjaya saw what had been done to the son the boon had given him, his grief came annihilating, the sort that takes a man's senses with it. He wept aloud and lamented in piteous words, and would not be reached, sitting for hours where the boy had once played, staring at ordinary earth that no longer turned to gold beneath anything.

'It was then that Narada showed himself to him, as he had come once already in the days of the boon. The sage stood before the ruined father, and what he offered first was not comfort.

'"Srinjaya," Narada said, "you too will die with your desires unfulfilled, for all that sages who speak the Veda have lived in your house. Hear of those who were greater than you, and see whether any of them escaped." And he began to tell him of kings. Of Marutta, son of Avikshit, at whose sacrifices the gods themselves served the food, and who gave away wealth no one could count. Of Suhotra, and Paurava, and Shibi son of Ushinara, whose chariot made the whole earth ring. Of Rama son of Dasharatha, whom his people loved as children love a father. Of Bhagiratha, who lined the banks of the Ganga with steps of gold. Of Dilipa and Mandhatri and Yayati, of Ambarisha and Shashabindu, of Gaya and Rantideva, of Bharata son of Dushmanta, and of Prithu whom the sages crowned emperor of the world. Even Rama of Jamadagni's line, who cleared the earth of evil kings, would die one day. Sixteen of them, one after another, each greater than Srinjaya in austerity, in truth, in compassion and in giving, and far greater than his son. And after every one of them the same words came back like a bell struck again: "He too died, Srinjaya, who was greater than you and far greater than your son. Do not grieve for a son who performed no sacrifice and gave no gift."

'By the time the roll was finished Srinjaya had gone silent. Narada asked him whether he had heard and understood, or whether the words had been wasted on him. And Srinjaya joined his hands and said that his grief had been driven off by wonder, the way darkness is driven off by the rays of the sun, and that he felt no more pain. "Then ask a boon," Narada told him, "and you will have it, for we do not speak what is untrue." But Srinjaya asked for nothing. It was enough, he said, that the sage was pleased with him.

'And because he asked for nothing, Narada gave him back the one thing he had lost. "I will give you your son again," the sage said, "who was killed for nothing by robbers, like a beast slaughtered at a sacrifice. I will take him out of that terrible hell and give him back to you." And the boy stood before his father once more, shining like the son of Kubera himself, and Srinjaya, holding him, was glad past anything a king has a right to expect, and afterwards performed many great sacrifices and gave away the gifts that go with them.'

Vyasa let the story settle before he spoke again in his own voice, the frame closing back around the tale the way it had opened. 'You will ask, Yudhishthira, why that boy could be given back and yours cannot. I will tell you. Srinjaya's son had not fulfilled the purposes of his being. He had performed no sacrifice. He had left no children. He had died miserably, carried off like a thing to be sold, and not in battle. That is why he could be brought back into this life: there was something left undone that the life was still owed.

'Abhimanyu is not like that. He was brave and heroic, and he has fulfilled the purposes of life. He broke into the array and blasted his foes by the thousand before the eyes of every bowman on the field, and fell there fighting, struck by sword and mace and dart and bow. The worlds that other men reach by long celibacy, by learning, by the greatest of sacrifices, by austerities held with closed eyes for a lifetime, he has reached already. He shines there now like a king in his own light. Those who live in heaven do not wish to come back to this world, and there is nothing he left unattained here that could draw him back.

'So he does not need your grief. It is the living who need it, not those who have gone to heaven, and a man for whom the living keep grieving is not helped by it. The wise think of the joy and the glory the dead have won, and they do not sit in sorrow, because sorrow is only pain. You have heard how Death was made and how evenly she treats every creature. You have heard of sixteen kings, and how prosperity does not stay. You have heard how Srinjaya's dead son was brought back, and why. Do not grieve. Rise, gather your strength, and set out against your enemies.

'Peace be with you. I go.'

And he was gone from the tent as he had come, and Yudhishthira, thinking of those great kings of old who had won their wealth by righteous means and given it all away, felt the grief loosen its grip on him at last. Then, with a heavy heart, he asked himself the one question the story could not answer: what were they going to say to Arjuna when he came back?